Prologue
Childhood memories...
Even as a young child, he was unusually thin and pale, with a constantly scraggly look that no amount of soap could purge from him. As young as age three, he was learning the world. The long, scary nights when his mother would be in the master bedroom with his father would terrify young Severus. The screaming and dull sounds of flesh hitting flesh came through the paper thin walls as though his parents were standing right over his bed. Even then, he could only curl up in a small corner and hope that his father never snapped and actually killed his mother. If that happened, nobody would ever notice if Severus just disappeared. Nobody cared enough to reach out to the young boy when he needed nurturing and guidance the most.
Severus learned the ropes as soon as he could walk. He soon learned that he could come and go as he pleased, and nobody would stop him. He never had a curfew, a bedtime, or a dinner prepared for him. Some days, there wasn't even food in the house. On those days, Severus, at the tender ages of toddler-hood, could do nothing but starve. But he starved for more than just food. He never did have that tender, guiding touch in his life that teaches young children the ingrained concept of compassion and love. When he was a baby, there was more than one time that he had been left outside without any blankets during a thunderstorm. It wasn't that his parents were intentionally being cruel. It was just that the stress of daily life in Spinner's End wore on a person day in and day out, and Severus' parents simply couldn't take the time or spend the effort to care properly for their son.
Even Eileen Prince's magic could not alleviate the discomfort of poverty, and, as a result, Tobias Snape grew more and more violent with each passing year. By the time Severus was six, it was a regular occurrence for him to walk into the kitchen to try and find something to eat but instead find his mother hunched over the one sink in their possession, frantically tracing newly made cuts and bruises with her wand, whispering incantations furiously under her breath. Some days, the floors would be slick with her blood, and Severus' father would be roaring about somewhere upstairs, immobile and floating in the air. It was not a healthy environment for Severus. While most young kids his age had doting mothers and fathers, he had a broken, dysfunctional family that was only concerned with the individual. His mother could never understand his father, and his father could never understand his mother. It was a sad case of muggles and witches never being able to coexist peacefully.
Each parent wanted Severus to be like them. Tobias wanted his son to grow up a muggle. It would be better for the child to not be involved in all the "hocus pocus" of magic and wizardry. Eileen, on the other hand, only wanted Severus to attend Hogwarts and get out of Spinner's End. She had high hopes for her son. Perhaps he would be the next Minister of Magic. For the longest time, howver, they hadn't known if Snape had taken after his mother, but one day, they found out. In his first and only show of violence toward his son, Tobias had grabbed Severus by the forearm and dangled him out the window for a minor transgression of the strict rules that governed the Snape household.
Dangling there, Severus was at the mercy of his father's wrath, which happened to be terrible that day. Tobias let go of young Severus, who dropped like a rock toward the uncertain ground some fifteen feet below. But Severus walked away with nothing more than a broken arm—something his mother would be able to fix with a few waves of her wand. Severus had landed hard, but there was almost no damage to his skin to prove that he had landed on top of the old, splintery stump in their barren front yard. There was no bruising, no lasting injury. Severus had bounced, which meant that he had magic, which meant that it was necessary that he be taught how to use it. And that meant Hogwarts.